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State of the Union? Nothing socialism or the Messiah can't fix!

Let’s start with the good part of President Obama’s State of the Union speech last night, since that’s a much shorter task:

He said his administration has “identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.” (A decent start against the $3.25 trillion he just spent in one single piece of legislation, but just wait until he tries to gore the sacred cows of members of Congress.)

He said he supports charter schools. (It was great to see Nancy Pelosi not clap.)

He said he would end wasteful defense spending (see same caveat as above about goring sacred cows…)

And one of the best bits, he said he’d eliminate crop subsidies “to large agribusiness.”

OK, that was easy.

The rest of the speech, though, left me fearing for our nation.

In short, he basically said:

(1) Everything he’s doing now is really the Bush Administration’s fault, and

(2) He’s going to “invest” in three of the major areas that liberal pro-Democrat interest groups have been salivating for for years: Energy (sop to the environmentalists), Health Care (sop to socialist nanny-staters), and Education (sop to one of the country’s most powerful unions.)

Time after time, he talked about “inheriting a deficit", seemingly forgetting that he essentially doubled it in his first few weeks in office. And he made the laughable (and therefore politically stupid claim) that “we passed a recovery plan free of earmarks", to which one could hear groans and giggles from the Republican side of the room.

I almost laughed out loud when Obama said that his plan will “save or create 3.5 million jobs” (clearly he’s not netting out the jobs he’ll destroy in the process) and that those will include jobs “constructing wind turbines and solar panels; laying broadband and expanding mass transit.” It was barely a notch better than paying people to dig holes and other people to fill them in.

Obama called for a cap-and-trade bill, despite the fact that the system has been an utter failure in Europe and despite the fact that more and more new data show that “climate change” is not greatly affected by CO2, or by humans for that matter.

While Obama mentioned the importance of parents in education, that’s clearly not where his heart – or your money – is. His nanny-state socialism was on full display when he said “the goal of this administration is to ensure that every child has access to a complete and competitive education – from the day they are born to the day they begin a career.” One of the great boondoggles of recent years is government-sponsored “early childhood education", but I’ll leave that discussion for another time.

If you were listening with your political Babel Fish in your ear, you could hear Obama tell Congress that he will use his political capital to get socialism even while forcing members of Congress to cut back on their spending wishes…because he can.

Oh, speaking of “Yes, I can", I should mention that Obama said of himself and his fellow politicians that “in our hands lies the ability to shape our world", and, if that weren’t messianic enough, he’s going to try to be the guy responsible for “a cure for cancer in our time.” I almost said “Jesus!” when I heard that, but even I, a not-particularly-religious Jew, recognized the unacceptable irony in that expression.

There’s a lot more to say about the speech, but I’m so sickened by what is happening to this country that I can’t bear to think about Obama any more tonight. I’ll leave it to others who get paid to suffer that sort of brain damage. In the meantime, I wonder how we are going to survive the national self-inflicted wound that is Barack Obama.

Following a report that Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” will remain a Democrat after his bid for the party’s presidential nomination, FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon commented:

The Fabian socialists over a century and a half ago knew that if their ideas were to spread efficiently, they would have to spread far enough to touch every bring and mortar of the political establishment.

There aren’t too many things economists all agree on; unlike in the natural sciences, one’s perspective on economics often depends heavily on how one understands human behavior, incentives, and psychology. This is why you have such strident differences of opinion between left- and right-leaning economists on issues like the minimum wage, tax policy, and the ability of government spending to stimulate the economy.

FreedomWorks Foundation expects to hear President Barack Obama announce more federal rules and regulations when he delivers his final State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening. Ahead of the address, FreedomWorks Foundation Chief Economist Wayne Brough commented on President Obama’s shocking expansion of executive power and reiterated our plans to mobilize against harmful rules and regulations in 2016.

Ahead of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress, FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon reflected on Barack Obama’s divisive presidency and described the agenda congressional Republicans should pursue in the coming months.